I'll tell you, shine sparking, wall jumping, bomb jumping, super jumps, screw attacks, space jumps, super missles, missle diffusion, gravity suits, this stuff is the shit!

I've been hooked on good old Metroid games for the past few days now, it started when I got Super Metroid Redesign.
It's a hack of the original Super Metroid, it changes a number of things, namely the maps and the difficulty, and importantly the game's physics too, it's one HELL of a tough game, I had to use a lot of Savestates, and sometimes even slowdown to beat parts of the game, taking up to 25 hours because some of the routes are extremely hard to figure out.
If you think you can handle it, go check it out.

So after I managed to kick the game's ass, I went on to try something a hell of a lot easier, Metroid Fusion for the GBA, I'd beaten it before but I could remember so little about the game.
It was a hell of a lot easier than before, I'll definitely give you that, but the linear gameplay was fun, although what I really wanted was the sequence breaking and fun exploits and techniques I could do in Super Metroid.

So next I picked up Metroid Zero Mission, man that was awesome, although it definitely felt short, most likely because it was based on a game with only 3 main bosses to begin with.
But sequence breaking and single wall jumping, oh the joy! Getting the Varia suit significantly early was as fun as ever, if I feel like playing it again shortly in the future I may even remember how to get the Screw attack early on, seemed pretty simple to do, just requires some shine sparking and super jumping at a certain location.
I also figured out how to get some Super Missles early, making it possible to skip a single boss altogether, but I went and beat it anyway so I could get some more Super Missles.

Metroid Zero Mission lets you play the original Metroid as soon as you beat the game, so I went and tried it out, even with the unusual NARPAS SWORD code I didn't like it to be honest.
Maybe I would've a long time ago, but not being able to shoot below you, just isn't, you know, fun.

And now, I'm playing yet another rom hack of Super Metroid called Metroid Legacy, this time it's not pissing hard beyond belief, actually it seems quite easy, maybe Redesign kind of acted like a training brace? Single wall jumping has actually proven itself useful a lot of times. As a matter of fact, using single wall jumping made me accidentally skip getting the ice beam and the grappling beam! Fuck! I need those! Admittingly, it doesn't seem like I need the grappling beam for actual grappling, but it made killing Draygoon, the third major boss pretty damn easy. (I just wall jump or single wall jump past everything it seems.)

After I beat Metroid Legacy, I think I saw there was a Metroid Zero Mission rom hack somewhere, I think I may well try that, otherwise I'll go try yet another Super Metroid rom hack, or maybe just Super Metroid. :D

...I REALLY, wish Nintendo would make either a new 2d Metroid for the DS, or a remake of Metroid II or even Super Metroid for the DS.

Oh my.

Christmas is here! And, it's raining? Go figure.

SBC's Cookie Clockmas is out now, so go watch that if you want.

Anyhow, it's only been a short Christmas so far, like, 4 hours into the day for me, but already I've gotten some nice sweets, some new pajamas, some money, oh! And a new DS lite! Gloss Silver looks AWESOME compared to my old White Lite.

It's great, because it's fresh, the D-pad is a lot more responsive, the touch screen is accurate, it doesn't have a nasty click when I open it, but there's one real issue to be honest, the screens.
A lot of the newer DS Lites have these cheap screens, the Crimson DS that was made for Brain Age 2 had really bad ones, but luckily it seems my only issue is ghosting (black images staying on the screen for too long)
Other than that, this is a nice sexy new DS.

So right now, my mum is cooking a nice Christmas dinner, which me, my mum, her boyfriend and my brother will all be enjoying in a few hours time, a nice turkey crown with gammon, roast potatoes, oh this'll be nice.

Oh right, I shouldn't just talk about what I got, right?
So I got for my mother a Newton Faulkner: Hand Built by Robots music CD, I really have no idea what this is like since I don't pay attention to the music scene, but this is what she wanted. :)
For her boyfriend, I had no idea what to get him, so she got me a book to give to him.
I have no idea what the book is, except that it's an autobiography of someone he likes. XD
For her boyfriend's son, who's going to be very surprised when he unwraps his Wii later today, I'm giving him my old copy of Rayman Raving Rabbids. I didn't care for it much myself, but a lot of people like this game, especially for it's multiplayer.
And for my brother, I got him two things.
First was a SNES to USB adapter, since I was going to buy myself one anyway.
Second was Contra 4 for the DS, I believe he loves this kind of game so I imported it for him from play-asia.com. I actually got very lucky, it was supposed to ship on the 27th, but it shipped on the 10th.

As for what other people got from eachother, well it's still early, but my mum got a FUCKLOAD of things, a book, an iPod nano, a stereo with dock, and a digital photoframe, insane!

There's a lot more left to the day, and then there's our annual family gathering on Boxing day tomorrow, so there's always more presents and more festive surprises.

I hope you have a merry christmas too. :)

Yeah, my clockmas movie, SBC's Cookie Clockmas is 100% finished now, with subtitles, credits, and of course the actual animation.

And thank god for that too, I've been busting my ass off these past few days to get a lot of the animation done, I can hopefully get my sleeping patterns in check now, and then enjoy some gaming tomorrow on Christmas Eve.

I'll be submitting it to here on Newgrounds and on Youtube as well on Christmas day, I hope you enjoy the 2 and a half minute long animation when you watch it, I certainly enjoyed making it.

EDIT: I've successfully finished all of the animation, making for 155 seconds in total.
All that remains is to add the subtitles, and make a credits screen.
At this point, I can pretty much guarantee that this will be released sometime on Christmas day. :)

Well, there's only a few days left until Christmas, and my short movie is two thirds done.
I'm confident that if I bust my ass for the next few days, thankfully with no more college, I can get this done.

Animating it has been tough with distractions like playing games and receiving college awards and visiting dentists and shit, but now I can really get to work on this.

You may've seen in the previous screenshot that StrawberryClock and OrangeClock were together to bake the cookies, but Rupee will play a part as well.

The movie also borrows a few elements from Phoenix Wright, if you're wondering how, you'll just have to wait and see.

I hope you enjoy this when I release it, hopefully on Christmas day, perhaps Boxing day if time constrains me somehow.

Well, Christmas is approaching, and I have been lazy as fuck, it's time I made a clockmas movie, right?

This year I'm only making a short 2-3 minute flash featuring SBC and OrangeClock in the same FBF style I used for my clockday movie, SleepEasy, I'm sure I can get it done in 12 days.

The basic plot is that SBC bakes cookies to raise funds for clockmas, it's more like a single joke to be honest because of the ending I've got in mind, but whatever.

Hopefully the project will go well, and I will have the movie ready for submission on Christmas day, or maybe Christmas Eve, I've not decided yet.

So, I recently bought myself a SNES Retroport, a basic SNES to USB adapter that lets me use my old SNES pad on my PC, it's great.

I think a lot of people would agree in that the SNES pad is actually one of the best designed controllers ever, given it's age, even today the DS uses the exact same button set up (although the start and select buttons are moved, everything else is the same.)

I've been trying it out on a number of different applications, and it's worked great so far.

1: The pad is ideal for DS emulation, because of the identical button setup, no$gba can use it very well, I'm playing Phoenix Wright on my PC, hah.
New Super Mario Bros plays well too, I'll likely take a whole bunch of screenshots too.

2: Naturally, SNES emulation works great with a SNES pad.
...I mean that's a no brainer, Super Mario All stars on my PC with a great display, yes please!

3: GBA emulation is good too, obviously.
I'd mostly just use this for recording gameplay footage these days.

4: VirtualNES.com combined with Joy2Key means I can easily play a large number of NES games at a whim with a good controller, and because of 4 spare buttons (X Y L R) I can assign some extra keys, say like use L and R for better Start and Select buttons, and set some auto-fire buttons as well.

5: Oddly enough, playing Super Smash Bros on an N64 emulators is pretty fun with a SNES pad.
I was never a big fan of analogue sticks, although I'm good with those on Melee, make no mistake.

Yeah, I have a feeling I'm going to love this SNES pad for a long time, no extra software needed either, great stuff.

Sakurai just announced on the Smashbros Dojo website that many past stages from Melee will be re-appearing in the new installment Brawl, just awesome.

Stages themselves are graphical replicas, so they don't look better, but with brilliant layouts like Temple had, I can only hope they choose some more great stages in the future.

What's more is that just like you'd think, given the music collecting feature, in addition to the original track you've also got more music for the stage, great!

Brawl has had some amazing updates in the past few weeks, too think, the game should've been coming out in America on Monday, just a few days from now too.

Remind me not to emulate 12 DS games at once.

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Back at the beginning of the year, when I was still running Windows XP on my old machine before upgrading to Vista, I was using a favourite skin of mine called Luna Element. Luna is XP's default skin, Luna Element is the perfect answer to it with sleek buttons, impressive shiny designs and amazing use of colours and contours, I absolutely loved the skin.

When the time came to upgrade to Vista, I realised I would have to let go, so I did, thankfully the Aero interface was actually very nice, but soon enough I grew tired of it.
Through all the XP skins I had used, through a patched uxtheme.dll or Windows Blinds, they all had a unique, pixelated charm to them to be honest, something Aero could never capture.
So soon enough, I tried good old uxtheme, but there is not one uxtheme skin for Vista that doesn't look like a crappy hack of Aero, seriously.
Then I tried Windows Blinds, it was good for a while, that's for sure, but I still grew tired, as many of the XP skins I loved simply didn't view right.

...Soon enough, WB 6.0 came out, I was entitled to a free upgrade, joy!
It even came with a skin called Classic, which was actually very nice, but lacking...

So getting tired of that old Classic skin, I started looking around.
I was reminded of that lovely XP skin called Luna Element, and remembered I have a laptop in my Psychology lessons for note taking, I decided to install and remembered how much it fucking rocked. I actually started longing for XP again JUST for this skin.

And finally, just about an hour ago, I discovered I could convert that classic fucking skin, for Windows Blinds.

You have no idea how fucking happy this makes me

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